Within an electronic document (ED), a string may be distributed across a set of textboxes. In other words, the string may be partitioned into multiple segments, and each segment may be placed within a different textbox of the set. As the textboxes are effectively linked by the string, each textbox within the set may be referred to as a linked textbox. In contrast, a textbox that contains the entire contents of a string, and thus is not linked to any other textbox, may be referred to as an isolated textbox.
An ED may have multiple sets of linked textboxes. The ED includes both the dimensions (e.g., height, width) of each linked textbox in the set and the order in which the linked textboxes are to be filled with the string. It is the responsibility of a rendering device (RD) to position the set of linked textboxes on the page(s) of the ED and to distribute the characters of the string across the set of linked textboxes.
In general, layout engines within RDs are well configured to process isolated textboxes. However, linked textboxes on the same or different pages present non-trivial problems for these layout engines. Despite the potential problems for the layout engines, users still wish to create EDs with linked textboxes and use existing layout engines to process the EDs.